Halloween, Take One

DD, Poppa, me, and SI heading home with candy!

I wanted to be the awesome mom that built the coolest homemade costumes.  I wanted to be the mom that rocked out dinosaurs and dreidles and panda bears and stalks of broccoli.

The best laid plans of mice and men, right?

I thought I was kind of wimping out this year.  This year, I made my children ghost costumes.  You see, they LOVE ghosts.  They get very excited about ghosts.  And they love saying "BOO!" and scaring grown-ups.  Or at least, getting grown-ups to pretend they're scared.  So, I made them adorable ghost costumes.

Or so I thought.

It turns out that what I made were horrific torture devices,  contrived only to torment my helpless children with their ghostly terror.

They wouldn't go within four feet of those costumes without throwing a fit.

Halloween came.  Each attempt at turning my adorable children into adorable ghosts failed.  M valiantly tried his own technique, "Do you want to go trick-or-treating?  You have to wear a costume!  Daddy will wear a costume!  Let's go get into your costumes!"

Costumes, they were fine with that.  But not ghost costumes.  While my mother laughed and laughed at my fruitless attempts to wrangle my children into their shrouds, I gave up.  I needed to think fast.  We had little Flamenco dresses for the girls from my parent's last trip to Spain.  "Do you want to be Flamenco dancers?"  "NO!"  I was surprised, but not yet completely sunk.  "Do you want to be ballerinas?"  We had tutus that a friend had given them the previous year.  "NO!"  Well, no type of dancing was to be acceptable.  I glanced at the wall- a friend who worked at the Renaissance Fair had given them super cool fairy wings for their birthday.  "Do you want to be fairies?"  "Yes!  Fairies!"

Fine.

So I put my children in poofy dresses, attached wings to their backs, and stuck these adorable (and perfectly matched) caps made by Grandma onto their heads, and thus were the costumes completed.

My daughters were fairies.  And they went trick-or-treating for the very first time.  And they loved it.

But Halloween isn't over.  We've got a big to-do next weekend as well.  And now?  Now that they've seen lots of other children in Halloween costumes?  Now they want to be robots.

How badly do they want to be robots?  They're watching Wall-E for the FIFTH TIME in about 24 hours.

Let's see if I can put together some robot costumes in three days.  And let's see if they actually wear them.


And now.... pictures!!!

Heading off for some trick-or-treating!

Fairies dancing down the street

SI is one happy fairy!

With DD, that makes TWO happy fairies!

"I just say, 'Trick or Treat,' and they put candy in my bag?  Too easy!"

M (Thor for Halloween) and SI

Daddy and DD

NaBloPoMo

This year, I was seriously considering signing up for NaNoWriMo.  And, again, I didn't do it.  What with everything else I have going on, it was just too daunting- too big of a commitment.  But I felt like a real loser.  I've got a novel inside of me... I just need the time to let it out.

Eventually.

And then I discovered NaBloPoMo.  Which is, absolutely, a gigantic copout.  But it's sure making me feel better about myself.

Instead of writing a novel in a month, I'm going to be writing something based on a prompt every day for a month.  It's not exactly cohesive, it's not exactly 50,000 words in 30 days... but it's something.  And I'll feel pretty good about it come December.

The first prompt of the month is, "What is your favorite part about writing?"

Convoluted grammar aside, this prompt completely illustrates why I think it's a copout, but here we go anyway.

Some people see writing as a process, as a formula with a beginning, a middle, and an end.  I only really see it as one element- an action.  To write.  The fact that at the end you have a finished product is sort of irrelevant. I do it because I love it, because I love the satisfaction of putting two words together in a unique way, because of the incomparable ability of words to convey something universal and true, or something completely unknown and mysterious.

I love that within the strict limits of language, absolutely anything is possible.  All you have to do to make something happen, to make another living, breathing human being believe anything even for a split second is to say it the right way.  And there is a right way.  There is always perfection.

At least, in literature.  Probably not on this blog, but in my mind.  In occasional fragments of thoughts, joined into glorious cohesion.  Every once in a while, writing yields something beautiful.  And that is amazing.

But it's not why I do it.  I do it because I love it.  I would write even if I whole-heartedly believed that I sucked at it.  I would write if there was nobody on earth to read it.  I write because words are too important not to use, not to test, and not to experiment with.

My favorite part of writing is writing.

And you're gong to be getting an eyeful of it for the rest of the month.